


And It Has Forged Us

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drift Hangover, Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-02
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 10:18:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/951918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hochotetsu is the core, the others are the skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And It Has Forged Us

**Author's Note:**

> Because I need more Mako swordsmithing. Please feel free to correct my hastily-researched forging process details, as well as my Google-translated Korean.

She stood at the tatara for three days and nights, melting the ore. She folded the steel sixteen times and forge-welded it sixteen times. She placed the iron core within the steel. She applied the narrow, serrated hamon with clay paste. She heated it again, and quenched it in seawater. She polished it with stone, slowly revealing its final shape. 

Then she did it a second time. 

They were not identical, but they were forged in the same fire, and that was all that mattered. These two would not join the other seven on the wall beside her: the three with crimson ito, the matched pair of mismatched sizes, the one with the fiercest cutting edge, and the katana with a bright, meandering hamon down the length of its blade, like a tongue of fire. These two were not for the sake of tribute--they would see combat this day.

Mako added the plain steel guards and wrapped the grips in black leather, and she had just attached the silk tassels, one red and one blue, when Raleigh told her in a ghosting of memory that they were waiting in the Kwoon. She slid both slender blades into their sheaths, which were beaten from anodized steel she had pulled off a Mark IV in Oblivion Bay. 

Her workshop adjoined the hangar, and Mako walked through what would look like chaos to an outsider, but Mako recognized it as an efficient collection of processes, methodical as a beehive. A dozen Mark VIs stood in various states of assembly and welding; sparks showered down from scaffolding. Mako stopped to scratch Max behind the ear, and nodded to Tendo and Marshal Hansen and Doctor Gottlieb, who gathered around Tendo's tablet and glanced from it to a Mark VI that was nearly finished, its core aglow. They were forging something new, for the day the Precursors tried again: adaptable machines, Jaegers that could evolve as quickly as the kaiju. 

The corridor she took to the Kwoon was quiet by comparison. Mako hefted the sheathed sabers one more time, satisfied with their weight, and stepped through the door. A group of cadets in navy coveralls parted before her, craning their necks to see what she carried. On the edge of the mat, Pang So-Yi and An Yuna stood in quiet conversation with Raleigh (who was himself, Mako reflected, not for the first time, forged in another sort of fire entirely, one which she hoped they would not see again in this world). 

Mako bowed first to So-Yi, and presented the red-tasseled saber, horizontally across the palms of her hands. The older woman grinned, and even though they had never Drifted, Mako could feel her anticipation, her delight even at the sheath, made from a piece of the original Nova Hyperion. Yuna was more reserved as Mako presented her saber. "언니, 감사합니다," she murmured. 

They had both helped her in the forge, trading hammer blows to drive impurities from the steel. Half the Shatterdome had helped with at least one of Mako's swords; Marshal Hansen joined in as soon as his clavicle had healed. Now, to hold the product of their effort, to feel its balance and its desire to sing through the air... well, that was a feeling Mako understood.

When Mako and Raleigh stepped away to stand with the rest of the audience, the two Rangers lowered their fencing masks and drew their blades in unison, and the flat light of the Kwoon caught something in the dual hamon that Mako had not seen in the forge. Now held at the sixte, primed to strike or parry, the blades woke. The hamon was the trace of a pulse, the serpentine path a life took, the thread of resistance inside a person that warped them to a certain shape under pressure, the muscle strand that moved a Jaeger's limb. The line connected everyone in this room. She glanced at Raleigh, to see if he felt it too, and he nodded, a smile in his eyes.

Mako watched her blades in experts' hands, her work in motion, and as So-Yi and Yuna fenced, the Drift was strong.


End file.
